WavPack 4.70.0 beta version available

2013-05-28 00:30:16

The beta release of WavPack 4.70 is available and assuming no bugs are found or last-minute changes suggested, this is essentially final. The impetus for this release was to incorporate some bug fixes that had accumulated since 2009, but I decided to also include a few new features that I had been thinking about.

The most interesting new feature is the ability for the wavpack command-line executable to accept existing wavpack files as input (i.e., transcoding). This allows users to easily change the settings of files in their lossless collection, or convert from older WavPack versions. The process copies all tag information from the source, and even allows modification of the tags. Temp files are also used now when overwriting and a verify option has been added, so it's possible to safely do transcoding in-place (although this is a beta version, so be careful!)

Note that care should be taken when transcoding to and from lossy files, and lossy to lossless transcoding is not allowed.

This release should generate identical files to the previous release (other than changes from bug fixes) and the performance should be similar (excepting differences from compiler revisions). I also built 64-bit versions for Windows, but they actually perform slightly worse than the 32-bit versions (at least on my system) so I'm not sure how useful they are or whether they will make it to the final release...any opinions?

New features:

transcoding from existing WavPack files (with tag copy)

option to verify WavPack file integrity on creation (-v)

use temporary files for safer overwriting

detect UTF-16LE encoding for tag text files (mostly a Windows thing)

transition to Visual Studio 2008 and 64-bit version (Windows)

option to allow up to 16 MB APEv2 tag data (--allow-huge-tags)

option for wvunpack to suppress audio decoding (useful for extracting only tags with -cc and -xx) (-n)

WavPack 4.70.0 beta version available

I have corrected the Arch Linux PKGBUILD in order to comply with packaging rules, and have it accepted by the automatic package submission code on AUR (you can find it here: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wavpack-beta/). Basically I renamed the package from "wavpack" to "wavpack-beta", and added the appropriate "provides" and "conflict" variables. This release will be short-lived, it is only meant to allow easy installation of the beta version, until 4.70.0 final is released (which will be available in the usual "extra" repository, via pacman

WavPack 4.70.0 beta version available

Since it's not officially documented, I'll share my findings about such files here:Code to determine the real wave format tag of from a WavPack context - presuming context to have been opened with OPEN_WRAPPER: